#No2PD

This Thursday, we are to vote on a reform to our electoral system: the introduction of the Alternative Vote. The No2AV campaign have offered a number of striking arguments against this change.

Always keen on the long view, I have dug out a political pamphlet from 1689, the year of the Bill of Rights and therefore the birth of Parliamentary Democracy and I publish the full text below.

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Sirs, th’unruly MOB hath lately fulminat’d for CHANGE to the POLITICK of this NATION & certain BILLS are presently laid before the HOUSE offering provision for ELECKTIONS unto PARLIAMENT & limitations o’er the power of the MONARCH. It is our settled VIEW that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a naughty doctrine & would be resist’d by all good MEN. We do venture to set forth our REASONS below.

ONE, we do declare that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is expensive, demanding much of the publick PURSE in the nature of BALLOT BOXES, PAPERS & sundry PENCILS. The vulgar OPINION of the people will needs be carried by HORSE and ERRAND-BOY at further expense. Who is to bear the EXCESS COST of this frivolity popularly nam’d VOTING? DECISIONS made by the King & agree’d by such hereditary MEMBERS as whimsickally choose t’attend at the HOUSE cost naught to the PUBLICK who ergo may go about their lives spending their BAUBLES on BREAD and SOIL, &c.

TWO, we do find that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a wretched BURDEN and TOIL to the BRAIN of the ORDINARY MAN, who will perforce be addl’d and confound’d by th’TASK to choose between divers CANDIDATES. Do we consider it a proper USE of publick TIME for each ENGLISH SUBJECT to discover FACTS and OPINIONS and DEBATES in the matter of GOOD GOVERNMENT? Sirs, we venture to say NO. To place an EX in THIS box or THAT is no TASK for an AMATEUR & we do judge it bothersome & unnecessary to rouse the PEOPLE from its BED to demoralyze it with this obscure INTERROGATION. 

THREE, though we have sought in EARNEST, we do find no NATION or KINGDOM in th’entire WORLD that do make USE of this PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY. Our efficacious & belov’d SYSTEM of ROYAL DECREE may be found in fully all DOMAINS save where there be but SAVAGES. Do we not trow if PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY were the SPLENDID FANCY that its FANATICKS pretend, we might have discover’d it OTHERWHERE?

FOUR, PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY do offend agin our TRADITIONS of JUSTICE. Indeed, Sirs, we say it is UNFAIR. Why, its CHAMPIONS themselves judge it possible that the BEST CANDIDATE, plainly judg’d by his WEALTH, PATRIOTISM & sporting PROWESS, may come second or e’en THIRD according to the insensible OPINIONS of the MOB? This KINGDOM already is possess’d of a fine CUSTOM to allow the best of us to come forth & assume AUTHORITY, namely WEALTH, STOCK & PRIMOGENITURE. What NEED hath ENGLAND of the accurs’d VOTE?

FIFTH, we do have it on AUTHORITY that the beliefs of MISS NELL GWYN were oppos’d unto REFORM, which, Sirs, surely settles the MATTER.

ROYAL PREROGATIVE on all CONCERNS works. Sirs, we hereby declare the HEALTH of PARLIAMENT as currently constitut’d & counsel with VIGOUR that it should never be modify’d. As the common PARLANCE tells us, if it be not broke, forbear to FIX it.

On Thursday, please vote YES to AV.

Wastwater

Simon Stephens’s new play is a triptych set around Heathrow Airport. No characters recur between the three scenes and only side-references suggest that there are connections between the people and the stories we see. In that it resembles, formally, Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge, though while that play goes from horror to redemption, in Wastwater, Stephens takes us steadily into the depths. It also reminded me, vaguely, of another triptych play, Far Away by Caryl Churchill. Partly because this also begins with Linda Bassett gently interrogating a young family member; but also because the three scenes are both disjointed and connected, building a sense of global vision and interpersonal mystery.

In the first scene of Wastwater a young man is saying goodbye to his foster-mother, awaiting his flight to Canada. In the second, a man and a woman meet in a hotel room near the airport for illicit sex; she reveals her secret history as a porn actress and she wants him to hit her, which eventually he does; in the third, a middle-aged man is with a woman who has arranged for him to buy a Filipino girl. The woman mocks him, threatens him, terrorises him; for a while we think he’s bought the girl for sex but it seems that he and his partner have been turned down for adoption. The girl arrives.

There are hints at connections; the woman in the third scene was probably a foster daughter of the woman in the first; the man in the first scene probably lost his job as a teacher for hitting the man in the second. All of them hum the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen: 'l’amour est un oiseau rebelle / Qui nul ne peut apprivoiser'.

Here’s the thing: I really love Simon Stephens’s writing. He’s gone on a fascinating journey from something pretty close to naturalism (Herons) to something very different (Pornography). He taught on the Royal Court Young Writers programme for almost a decade and he knows what he’s doing. But what he’s doing is deliberately writing badly and it’s fascinating.

Badly is too blunt. What I mean is that he does things with dialogue, scene and character that in a lesser writer you’d say are just errors. And, hey, it may turn out that it doesn’t work, looking back on it all. But at the moment, I feel that he’s creating a distinctive, absolutely contemporary vision of the world and is doing so through the reinvention of dramatic form. And I’m a total sucker for that kind of thing.

The thing he does is have people say and do stuff. That doesn’t sound very revolutionary, I know, but what he seems to be working towards is a kind of dramatic expression without subtext. The scenes are psychologically rather blank; the presence of actors performing them give them perforce a kind of presumed psychological coherence and tics and mannerisms (in the best sense) suggest thought processes, but elsewhere things happen, words are said and the psychology in the actions is opaque. A standard piece of dramaturgical advice would be to say that action (including dialogue) should arise out of character and situation. Revelations work well on stage when one feels that they have been forced from a particular character by a particular situation.

This isn’t really what happens here. In the first scene, the boy, Harry, admits that his bladder sometimes gets very full and he ‘leaks’: basically, he wets himself. His foster-mother is concerned about it but he is not; is he mad? is he contemptuous? is he lying? It’s not clear. In the second act, Lisa suddenly admits to her pornographic past (or is it present?). The speech is very long (two pages in the published text). Is this true? It’s hard to say (when she finds a porn movie on the internet at the end of the scene, the text insists that this is not of her). If it’s true, why does she say it? Is she confessing? Trying to shock? Trying to please and arouse Mark? Impossible to judge. By normal standards the quantity, relation and manner - and maybe quality - of her speech (to use Paul Grice’s terms) are awry. In the final scene, why does Sian bait and haze Jonathan? Is she trying to humiliate him? Terrify him? Is she seriously checking he is a fit foster-father? Is she taking out on him the absence of her own father? Her hatred of foster-parents in general? The scene doesn’t tell us.

Now in ordinary circumstances, this would be a disaster, dramatically. The characters would be opaque, random, arbitrary. Psychological consistency, truth, depth are all valuable assets on stage. Here the revelations are just things that happen, entirely on the surface; like sun splintered and rippling on a deep lake, it repels attempts to see below the surface. This could make the characters seem unengaging, perverse, comic, surreal. There are elements of the last three, but because Stephens writes with such vigour and energy and attention to verbal detail they are always compelling (to me anyway, I see that some ‘critics’ feel rather differently).

More significantly, though, I think in fashioning this strange surface, Simon Stephens is trying to do with sincerity what a previous generation did with irony: explore its complexity and contradictions. On one level though, he is trying to have people speak directly and clearly to each other, to simply see the truth, to be affirmative about the world. This is why I am puzzled by the critics who have found the play bleak and manipulative. It’s true that there are some wintry exchanges and the characters seem uneasy in their skins; but ultimately the play is affirmative about people’s need for each other. And most of all the play is not manipulative at all - well hardly at all. Instead, it’s laying its characters and situations out with virtually no commentary, no irony, allowing us to make our own judgments.

Throughout his plays - and increasingly - he gives us characters simply announcing thoughts and affirming the world. ‘I like this bar. I like the way they’ve screwed the tables to floor. I like it,’ says Nicola in A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, ‘I like train stations as a whole really. I like train travel. It’s my favourite means of transport’. Do you like living alone? asks one character to another in Pornography. ‘I do. You know? I do. I do. I do. I really do. I like shopping for food. I like discovering food shops in odd places and going there. I like eating out occasionally on my own.’ In Harper Regan, Mickey, a man that the eponymous Harper has just met in a pub, suddenly decides to tell her about his hatred of the Jews. In Motortown, Paul rants about the War on Terror, hardcore pornography and the shortcomings of the poor. In neither case are these sudden outbursts evidently emerging from character; in fact, in both cases the outbursts are pretty much the main evidence we have of their character. 

I say he’s exploring the complexity of sincerity. First though I think it’s important just to acknowledge the straight-ahead desire to show people just acting, just speaking, and speaking sincerely, honestly and clearly. At the risk of naivety, of being undramatic. His characters are always referring to things as ‘remarkable’, ‘fantastic’, ‘brilliant’. He likes the word ‘nice’, maybe because of its naivety, its excess of feeling over precision, its gauche affirmativity. (I think of Suspect Culture, whose original company name was ‘Art is Nice TC’.)

And the reason for that might well be a general impatience with irony. The 1990s were dominated by irony; think of the ubiquity of air quotes, of uptalk, of Chandler-speak (‘This is SO not funny’ ‘Oh, you THINK?’) where we don’t just get attitude but an attitude to the attitude. Think of Britpop, all irony and quotation. Compare that with Arcade Fire, all passion and sincerity. And remember that moment in Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London when Colin starts dancing and singing along to ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ and the stage direction dares it to be beautiful and warns us that there should be ‘No ironic moves’. Simon’s at the theatrical headland of this anti-ironic movement. It’s an impatience with irony and in some ways an impatience with fiction and dramaturgy: Pornography has some similarities with Attempts on Her Life (lack of stage directions, lines not assigned to characters, freedom of casting, fragmented structure) but Attempts’ openness only reminds you of the author’s furious precision and control whereas Pornography seems deliberately to give up authorial control altogether. You can do the play in any order. Does that go down to the words themselves? Is it really a grab bag of text? Certainly through all the recent work, there’s a sense you get that Stephens has no time for the elaborate contrivances of formal devices or what David Eldridge once called ‘clunky what’s-round-the-corner plotting’.

But there is more complexity going on here. First because it demands a different kind of performance, a new settlement between stage and auditorium. John Osborne wrote once that he wrote Look Back in Anger ‘in a language in which is was possible only to tell the truth’. I’ve always wondered what he meant but I think I see something here in the work of Simon Stephens. The excess of language over character and situation creates a kind of speech the speaks across the proscenium. Like Jimmy Porter, it feels as if the audience is being addressed as much as the characters, because the speech only has one foot inside the scene, the narrative. This requires of the actor both realism and a kind of presentational quality; to be both in and outside the fictional world.

Second, what Simon’s work does is portray a picture of the world that is distinct and original. It embraces chaos. Robert Holman - his friend and collaborator - once said that the way he writes is that he starts at 9.30 each morning by writing dialogue. Anything at all. And he does that until one of the characters says something that surprises him. Its a kind of ability to be surprised by randomness, the unconscious, the chaotic synaptic connections of the mind. And by embracing this it creates a vision of a world of chaos, of surprise. It’s a world that both affirms chaos and also free will. It’s a world of renewal and change and possibility.

Third, it renders character both transparent and opaque. Because while these characters reveal themselves they also hide. We know what Lisa is saying about herself but we are unsure why. And this perhaps says something about the puzzles of identity, the ways we can be strangers even to ourselves. It’s a technique that hints at depths, perhaps great depths, like the grey unfathomable depths of Wastwater itself, but leaves us staring only at our own reflections in its glassy surface.

I think this is one of the most remarkable plays of the last few years. Its dismissal by certain critics saddens but doesn’t surprise me. The critics want nice plays and Simon Stephens isn’t ready to make nice.

Cause Célèbre

Terence Rattigan’s last play is also one of his best and one of his most uncharacteristic. Uncharacteristic because it is not domestic and it’s not linear; it’s a dizzying, brutal, time-and-place-jumping, epic piece of work. He’d done a few more epic pieces before - Adventure Story, Ross, Bequest to the Nation - but this is far more effective than those.

The play concerns the true story of Alma Rattenbury who was discovered one night in 1935 standing above the brutally battered body of her husband. During the trial it was revealed that she’d taken a younger lover and both she and her lover initially claimed to have done the deed. Eventually she cracked and claimed her innocence. To a public outcry, she was found not guilty, whereupon she took herself off to a field by a river and stabbed herself three times in the heart. The play is, as so often, about forbidden desire and the British resistance to it. He parallels it with a fictional story of the forewoman of the jury who dislikes sex, has a son who is desperately pursuing it, and a husband who wants her back. She begins by sharing in the mob’s hatred of Alma and her lust but ends up understanding, though losing much.

This is not a good production. There are good things; the second half is much better than the first as the barristers camp it about most enjoyably in the courtroom scenes; Anne-Marie Duff is rather effective as Alma, both innocent and flirtatious, flippant and hurting. But otherwise, the play doesn’t work. Mainly the fault is the building; the Old Vic is so huge that the actors are all turning out and bellowing. It ruins the distinction between the shabby domestic scenes and the grand theatre of the courtroom - and that distinctions is part of the point. And the set and lights by Hildegard Bechtler and Bruno Poet just don’t work at all; visually, the stage is all so dark and drab, which means that we get no distinction between indoors and outdoors, past and present, night and day. It all looks dark and the grimness is flagged up for us. Bechtler’s sets tend towards the monumental and this has a rising and falling ceiling that may, for all I know, be intended to suggest the crushing judgementalism of an unforgiving world, but made everything look machine-like and soulless and this is a play with a lot of soul. The final scene, by the riverbank, should be pastoral and beautiful in horrible contrast to her suicide but in rich amplification of her simple mantra: ‘What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it’. Instead it was bleak, hollow, dark and stagey.

I liked Niamh Cusack as the jurywoman; she had a brittle sexuality about her - much better than playing her as prim and stuck-up. This was an earthy woman and her feeling for her son was very believable. But the son - in fact both the sons in the play - were much too old and much too priggish. I’d accept this is partly in the writing but surely you can get eleven-year-olds who look eleven? The father never seemed sexual, just sententious.

I’m spoiled, of course, because I still remember so vividly Neil Bartlett’s luminous production at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1998. That one was fluid, roguish, sexy and camp; light in a way and then crushingly sad. It’s good to see a production of this play but this won’t have helped its - or Rattigan’s - reputation. This is Rattigan’s most experimental work; it came over last night as his stodgiest.

Coalition

David Laws’s 22 Days in May is a first-hand account of the talks that led from the inconclusive general election of 2010 to the formation of the first Coalition cabinet. It suggests that Labour didn’t seriously want to form a coalition and Ed Balls pretty much sabotaged the talks; the Tories meanwhile were professional, eager to compromise and constructive.

Is this true? Well, I wasn’t in the room, of course. There are disputes about the sincerity of the Labour talks, though Peter Mandelson in The Third Man has said ‘I doubted whether there was a real prospect of a government combining ourselves and the Liberal Democrats. It would have been a coalition of the losers’. Since Mandelson was leading the Labour talks, perhaps he is acknowledging that there was no real appetite for talks.

However, it serves David Laws to blame the Labour Party for the failure of a new Lib-Lab agreement, or a ‘progressive alliance’ that Paddy Ashdown and others had dreamed of. The book makes it clear that talking to the Tories was extremely unpopular with some members of his party. In one striking section, Laws shows up at a meeting of the parliamentary party and sits next to Ming Campbell: ‘I knew Ming would be disappointed that the prospect of a coalition with Labour was over, but I did not realise just how angry and upset he was until I sat down next to him. Ming and I are friends [...] but on this occasion he was in no mood to talk, and I was relieved when I was eventually asked to come to the front of the room to join the other negotiators’.

The book is throughout written with hindsight, so we know the Labour talks will go badly even before they are begun. There is quite unconcealed personal contempt for Gordon Brown that runs through the book and, on the other hand, a breezily admiring attitude to the Tories. Laws notes that ‘there is a clearly a strong relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and the importance of this can’t be underestimated - it sets the tone for the government at every level’, an opaque phrase which might say as much about their shared class background as anything else.

David Laws is an odd Liberal. He was offered a post in the Tory shadow cabinet in 2006, with the promise that this would translate into a cabinet post if they were elected. He turned it down, saying that ‘the truth is that I am a liberal, not a Conservative. I believe passionately in creating a fairer country, but I happen to believe that this will be done through liberal means and not by big government solutions’, which is pretty much saying he’s a liberal because the Tories are too socialist for him. He speaks like a true Tory when he observes that ‘the Treasury was relishing getting back to fulfilling its traditional role as guardian of the public finances and taxpayer interest after a long period of public profligacy’. After his first (and only) performance as the despatch box as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, one Conservative MP called him ‘the biggest Tory in the Cabinet’ and it’s hard not to disagree.

David Laws was coeditor of The Orange Book, a collection of essays published in 2004 with the subtitle ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ which, broadly, means reclaiming economic liberalism for the Liberal Democrats. The first of his two contributions to the book is a strongly-argued call for the Liberal Democrats to embrace libertarianism at the personal level and economic liberalism (i.e. neoliberalism) at the state level. He argues that the Party has drifted towards what he calls, with typically Tory rhetoric, ‘nanny-state liberalism’. In fact, he breaks the liberalisms he thinks the party should embrace into personal, political, economic and social headings, arguing for rolling back the frontiers of the state, repatriating powers from the EU, embracing privatisation, lowering taxes and introducing more market competition into the NHS. It’s Thatcherism, though without her emphasis on Victorian morality.

His last proposal is set out more fully in his second chapter, which considers how to improve the NHS. Inevitably, he disdains the idea of a ‘better-funded status quo’ (an option that he deals with peremptorily and tendentiously), then dispatches the Labour reforms and the Tory voucher system, and proposes a National Health Insurance Scheme in which everyone would choose from a range of health providers, including the NHS. We’d be able to change every year. The transaction costs would be enormous and - rather nannyishly - it bossily demands that we research into our doctors in a way that the evidence is that most people don’t want to do. The majority of people never change their bank account; where would we get unbiased, reliable and appropriate information about the quality of our health provider? It’s a nerve-racking and silly system that could only be born in the head of someone with a madcap love of market mechanisms and no understanding of people.

So David Laws is basically a Tory who thinks the Liberal Democrats could be repositioned to the economic right and social left of the Tories. He was never going to be sympathetic to a coalition with the Labour Party so I am left wondering if the lack of goodwill is entirely to be laid at the feet of Ed Balls.

These thoughts matter because the Coalition currently seems more splintered than at any moment in its first year. Nick Clegg and David Cameron have expressed precisely opposite views about the nature of apprenticeships. Vince Cable has been outspoken in his rejection of David Cameron’s anti-immigration speech. Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne have been extremely vociferous in their criticism of the low, lying tactics of the ‘No’ campaign in the AV referendum. William Hague and others have tried to sound conciliatory and it may be that the Lib Dems are trying to reassert their independence fearing a haemorrhage in their support at the local elections, but it’s going to be awkward round the Cabinet table next time they meet.

Laws paints the Party has having surprisingly embraced the Tory coalition, pace Ming and Paddy, but if - as looks likely - the AV Referendum fails and senior Tories are responsible for lying about the proposal, it would be very difficult for Nick Clegg to retain the support of his MPs and of the Tories, Could the Coalition fracture? Well, if it was the perfect marriage, as Laws suggests, then maybe it’s solid. But if he’s wrong, or simply seeing it with blue-tinted spectacles, then we may see the Coalition split apart, with the Tories forced to soldier on as a minority administration, facing constant votes of confidence and unable to legislate. We’ll see.

Three other small things: first, the book is very boringly written indeed. Banal, impersonal, Pooterish in places. Take this piece of reportage: ‘We strolled back in silence across Portcullis House, and then down the escalator that connects with the main Palace of Westminster. We turned right before reaching the Terrace of the House of Commons, and then right again to the lifts to take us up to the first floor of Parliament’. A literary stylist he ain’t. And that confirms my sense that he’s not a ‘people person’.

Second, it seems as though university tuition fees were barely mentioned in the negotiations. Could the Lib Dems really have given up their pledge on fees without a whimper? David Laws was not a supporter of any pledge on tuition fees so maybe he plays this down too much, but it does look as though the Lib Dems and Tories seriously underestimated the significance of the tuition fees debate and the level of resistance they would meet.

Finally, and quite off-topic, this is the first eBook I’ve read. In fact I read it via the Kindle app on my iPhone so it’s about as unfriendly a reading experience as you could imagine. But it was surprisingly pleasant and easy to do. Being able to find quotes by the app searching the text - as I’ve done to write this - is extremely helpful. It’s making me seriously think about trying to move away from paper...

The Stock Da'wa

Hampstead are opening their downstairs space for an experimental season. This is becoming the thing for established new writing theatres to do; Soho recently announced a similar idea. In Hampstead’s case this experimentalism extends to not inviting critics yet giving somewhat full productions. An earlier example of this work was Small Hours. The Michael Frayn Space - as this downstairs is called - is, to judge simply by these two showings, highly adaptable. For Small Hours, the space was transformed into a front-and-back living room, immaculately real, a full immersive installation in which we shared the space of the performer. Here it’s a somewhat more conventional theatre space on three sides, but it’s a large rural kitchen (pictured) that runs on beyond the limits of the stage. The experimentalism is also that the script here seems to me an improvisation, a draft, a work-in-progress. This is a David Eldridge script so it’s still very highly achieved but you can feel ideas being worked out, choices still finally to be  made.

SPOILERS: Paul turns up at Joan’s house late one night covered in blood. Paul was a good friend of her son, Oliver, who was knocked down and killed by a train 22 years before. Paul was so often at Joan’s house before and after the accident, that he became a kind of surrogate son, despite being from a much poorer family. But now he has converted to Islam and he brings with him the severed head of a British soldier. He’s come to preach and he’s come to explain; he’s come to tell Joan that Oliver was suicidal but that it was he, Paul, who pushed him under that train. He has also come to reveal that Mr Wilson, his old teacher and a longtime friend of Joan’s who is there that night, knows more about Paul’s story than he let on. Eventually Joan collapses and dies, perhaps from an injury sustained just before Paul arrived, perhaps from the stress of his visit.

A Da’wa is a preaching of the Muslim faith. Stock is a small village just north of Billericay in Essex. This is a play about the feared other coming home. It reminded me of Simon Stephens’s Motortown; that play shows us a British soldier, having served in Iraq, coming home and seeing Britain for the first time as decadent and cruel and he exacts a meaningless but vicious revenge. Here it’s the same, though Paul has become Other himself.

The basic shape is a simple one. A figure from the past turns up with a story to tell; the action of the play is the telling of that story. In this sense it resembles a play like Orphans by Dennis Kelly (whose intruder also shows up covered in blood). It’s a play of exposition, of gradual revelation. The energy of the play is verbal, once the situation is established - which here is that Paul is violent and the two other characters are old and weak, so they have to listen. It is difficult to maintain momentum in a play like that, for two reasons: one, the revelations really need to pay off; I felt with Orphans that Dennis Kelly was having to ramp up the horrors of the revelations beyond credulity just to keep the play from stalling; two, a play of revelation is really a play of concealment - all the energy has to go into not spilling the beans early on. In fact, writing such a play is a fascinating balancing act, because the writer has to satisfactorily answer two questions: (a) why is he telling this story? (if he doesn’t there’s no play) and (b) why isn’t he telling this story? (if he tells it straight away, there’s no play). You have to find a perfect balance between these two opposing forces.

Here, once we have discovered (with echoes of Emlyn Williams’s brilliant 1930s potboiler Night Must Fall) that the intruder has a severed head in a bag, the revelations are more delicate: Paul confronts Joan with his sense of how she made him feel about his class and confronts Mr Wilson with the truth of his predatory behaviour and deception of Joan. I did feel that Joan’s death was a moment where the script - in this draft - was confecting a climax rather than letting it emerge fully from the action. (It’s complicated because the play begins with Joan appearing having bumped her head; it’s not tonally clear whether there is a mystery in this, whether it’s comic slapstick, or whether it’s sheer accident, so the significance of her death is also opaque.) I was more concerned by the way the play - and Paul - seemed to be spooling out its revelations too slowly. Why didn’t Paul say it all more quickly? Why did he choose to pre-announce his revelations so portentously? I wasn’t convinced that this was wholly character and not at least partly the necessity of the form.

Our view of Paul swings erratically through the play. At times he seemed like a true zealot, convinced of his cause; at others, he seems still to be the frightened boy, terrified and even apologetic for what he had done; and then at others it seemed that the religious rhetoric and ideological zeal was simply a cover for personal revenge and even class and sexual confusion. I really felt the first two were the most interesting and the last seemed just personal. I thought it might be interesting if it seemed as though Paul’s religious conversion were a response to a society’s fucked-up attitudes to class and desire, less so if it was a response to Joan and Mr Wilson.

The dialogue style is vigorous and dynamic, as always with David Eldridge’s stuff. There are probably three different styles that by and large he combines, though I feel the mixture splits on occasion. There’s a realist, human story of psychological hurt and dignity; then there’s an Ortonesque aphoristic comedy (from memory: ‘You have no dependents!’ ‘I have my cats’ ‘That’s no albatross in financial terms’). And then there are moments that remind me that David did a (brilliant) version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck - another play in which an outsider enters a home, forces the inhabitants to face the truth about themselves, and in doing so results in the death of one of them. Here it’s a kind of nineteenth-centuryish. At one moment, Joan murmurs (to herself? to the audience?) ‘Betrayed!’ and sounds like Lady Audley. This is not a criticism, I should say; it was an interesting moment that suggested that these are grand passions that are boiling over in this kitchen.

It felt first- or second- drafty. I’d be prepared to bet that it was written straight through and perhaps only tinkered with afterwards. I think it’s quite likely that he wrote with only a light sense of where he was going with the story. It’s a script of discovery and what he’s discovered, it seems to me, is the makings of a very powerful play about our own otherness, the way that, horrifically, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 have made our own culture strange to us, how we all know how hateful we have become.